quarry Technologies Enhances Its iQ Family, Adding A New Level Of Security To VoIP And Videoconferencing

Quarry Technologies announced enhancements to its iQ product family that enable network operators to safely offer voice and video services based on the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and H.323 standards.

With the updates, next-generation Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and videoconferencing sessions can filter through the system's stateful Internet firewall without allowing unauthorized traffic to pass, thus preventing network intrusions. Furthermore, end users of the new voice and video services can maintain private addressing in their Local Area Networks (LANs) utilizing specially tailored Network Address Translation (NAT) technology. These capabilities, together with Quarry Technologies' capacity for Gigabit-speed encrypted Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) with fine-grained Quality of Service (QoS), and Denial of Service (DOS) attack prevention, represent major advancements in security for support of rich-media and interactive networked applications.

"SIP and H.323 application awareness in the iQ product family will provide our customers a competitive advantage in supporting emerging communications trends," said Steve Kohalmi, CTO at Quarry Technologies. "No other system can deliver this degree of stateful firewall filtering and network address translation, over an IPsec encrypted VPN with application-level QoS, all concurrently at up to Gigabit line-rate. Those looking to offer VoIP and videoconferencing services need such high security and high quality to prevent network assaults from affecting the latency-sensitive application traffic."

Service providers and operators of large private networks can readily implement the Quarry Technologies iQ-series Service Edge Switches and iQSMS Service Management Suite to secure softswitches, media gateways and other elements in their converged networks. Logically deployed behind the access devices and in front of the backbone routers, this highly manageable solution distinctly identifies subscriber traffic and classifies application flows at the network boundary. There it applies customized services, and optionally aggregates similar streams by service class into easy-to-manage high-bandwidth flows, prior to sending the traffic securely over the shared IP backbone.

Firewall support for SIP and H.323 is available immediately. NAT and Network Address Port Translation (NAPT) support for SIP and H.323 are scheduled for release next month. Both functions are included in Quarry Technologies' iQsec Feature Pack, along with other key intelligent network security functionality.